Seashells on Mount Everest: What the Flood Left Behind

Introduction: Sea Life at the Top of the World

The summit of Mount Everest stands 8,849 meters above sea level, nearly nine kilometers into the sky, yet the rock just below the top holds the fossilized remains of animals that lived on the bottom of an ocean. Climbers who pick their way across the final ridge are walking over the seafloor. For anyone meeting this fact for the first time, it feels like a riddle: how did creatures that lived under water end up higher than any other place on Earth?

For many Christians, especially those who read the Book of Genesis as a literal history, the riddle has a ready answer. The Bible describes a flood that covered "all the high mountains" of the earth, and they see marine fossils on the highest peak as exactly what such a flood would leave behind. The argument has been made in popular sermons, in creation-science books, and in museum exhibits for more than sixty years, and it remains one of the most common ways the Flood is connected to physical evidence.

Thesis

Defenders of a global Flood argue that marine fossils on Everest are best explained by a single worldwide catastrophe, in which floodwaters deposited sea life across the continents and later movements of the earth's crust lifted those deposits into mountain ranges. Mainstream geology explains the same fossils through slow plate tectonics acting over hundreds of millions of years. This paper sets out the flood argument at its strongest, explains the scientific account that most geologists accept, and ends with the position of faith that many believers take when the two accounts disagree.